The overall Liftr Cloud Index for the week ending Friday 2/15/2019 is 102.0 (+0.0%), flat from the previous week. Alibaba Cloud (63.7, +0.7%) and Microsoft Azure (104.3, +0.4%) were directionally up, while Google Cloud (80.2, -0.2%) and AWS (106.2, -0.3%) were directionally down. None of the cross-industry All CSP attributes moved more than half a point in either direction.

Alibaba Cloud’s overall Liftr Cloud Index score (63.7, +0.7%) increased based on a large boost in Sentiment (97.7, +5.9%). Alibaba Cloud Sentiment score rose as it returned to generating its own highly positive tweets. Alibaba Cloud’s Adaptability score decreased slightly (34.1, -0.7%) as it ended the week with 294 apps in its marketplace, down from 298 the previous week. Alibaba Cloud’s Adaptability score still remains last among the tracked CSPs—more than 90 points below Microsoft Azure.

Amazon AWS remained flat across all attributes except for dips in Sentiment (99.1, -1.2%) and Instance (84.8, -0.8%). AWS’s Instance score fell slightly as its cost index for mainstream compute instances rose slightly. Sentiment dropped mostly due to a lack of highly positive tweets, rather than from negative tweets. AWS suffered a Relational Database Service (RDS) and Elastic Beanstalk outage in Sydney, Australia mid-week, but its Reliability score quickly recovered with no effect on its average score for the week. AWS maintains its narrow lead on the overall Liftr Cloud Index. Liftr Cloud Index will record AWS’s new US East GovCloud region next week.

Google Cloud Sentiment (100.0, -2.0%) returned to more normal levels after the highly positive tweets from the previous week abated. Google Cloud’s other scores were flat from the previous week.

The week’s Liftr Cloud Index was essentially flat, except for Sentiment scores across all the tracked CSPs, Alibaba Cloud’s ever-volatile Adaptability score and slight AWS and Microsoft Azure pricing-derived Instance score declines. This may be due to IBM Think and many cloud companies are saving announcements for closer to Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona at the end of February.

News, Analysis, Commentary & Opinion

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud introduced Dpath, a dedicated connection to specific servers in Alibaba’s public cloud for retailers to take advantage of during periods high online retail traffic, such as China’s “Double 11” shopping festival. It is likely that Alibaba already implements Dpath for its close ecommerce partners and is following AWS in exposing useful internal features to its wider public cloud customer base.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon released Corretto 11 as a preview. Amazon Corretto is a replacement for OpenJDK. Moving to support all of the features of the current OpenJDK 11 release (Corretto 8 is currently in general availability as a replacement for the older OpenJDK 8) is further evidence that AWS intends to remove Oracle from the delivery chain for Java applications.

AWS released five new EC2 bare metal instances for “specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted Tier 1 business critical applications”. These new bare metal instances are available in AWS’s US East, US West, Europe and Asia Pacific regions. Liftr Cloud Insights believes that these new instances are likely to be available on AWS Outpost Native when that product ships.

Google Cloud also announced Google Docs API for workflow automation, clearly ramping up to compete with Microsoft Azure in its core enterprise workflow automation market. API integrates with Google Docs apps and Google’s G Suite (as one would expect) and can also be used to input and export documents from contact management systems (CMS).

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft launched new Azure Maps services and SDKs this week, including integrating Azure Maps with Azure Active Directory, providing spatial operations analytics and updated Android and Web software development kits (SDKs). Microsoft claims the fastest map data refresh rate in the industry based on its new relationship with TomTom.

Last week we reported about Microsoft Azure and TomTom expanding their partnership. Sometimes, a good defense is a good offense. We believe Microsoft Azure is taking the mapping fight to Google Cloud as Google Cloud gets serious about competing in the enterprise market. Something is clearly happening with maps and location-based services at Microsoft Azure, it looks like a high-priority initiative.

Microsoft Azure’s IoT Hub Java SDK now officially supports the Android Things platform. Microsoft says that all the features of its IoT Hub Java SDK will be available on the Android Things Platform and that the Android Things Platform will be tested with every future IoT Hub Java SDK release. Microsoft plans to publish the exact platforms on GitHub. Microsoft completed its acquisition of GitHub in October 2018.

Other Cloud News Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

Oracle announce general availability (GA) of its Marketplace in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Marketplace in OCI opened with 49 apps. For comparison, Alibaba’s marketplace is the smallest of our tracked CSPs and closed this week with 294 apps—6x more than OCI.

AT&T

On February 7, Mirantis joined the OpenStack Foundation’s Airship project. Airship was originally funded by AT&T, SKT and Intel with the goal of enabling telcos use on-premises Kubernetes container orchestration to support their software defined networking (SDN) infrastructure deployments. Mirantis’s engagement with AT&T to support Airship is said to be an eight-figure, multi-year contract.

Earnings

Liftr Cloud Insights is not a financial analyst firm. We provide strategic analysis of company earnings reports and associated end of quarter statements.

CenturyLink

CenturyLink conducted a detailed audit of its data center assets in 2018 and reports more than 150,000 enterprise buildings worldwide including more than 2,200 public and private data centers and an increasing number of on-network buildings. It is moving away from less profitable products and customer contracts, and it is focusing more on cloud, security, hybrid networking and edge computing product development for its enterprise customers, especially in support of hybrid cloud environments. Coupled with its fiber network, CenturyLink is leaning on its widely distributed central offices, data centers and the other points-of-presence to become a key vendor in edge computing. This is a massive pivot for CenturyLink away from being seen solely as a communications vendor. Liftr Cloud Insights is monitoring how well they execute in coming quarters.

Cisco

Cisco has been caught in the US vs China trade war. Huawei and ZTE have been banned from participating in US government purchases, and US cellphone carriers faced political pressure to drop Huawei’s smartphones. It is likely that the US government will keep up its pressure on Huawei. Reciprocally, Cisco appears to be coming to terms with being virtually locked out of China’s IT market. Given that most of the cloud service providers are trying to lower their cost of networking, Cisco is investing in enterprise multi-cloud enablement and network security and in 100 Gbps and 400 Gbps network upgrade cycles.

Equinix

Equinix partners with both AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Cisco and Equinix partner to deliver Cisco WebEx Edge Connect. In 2018, one-third of its total bookings came from enterprise customers—its fastest growth segment—led by energy, healthcare and retail vertical markets. Enterprise-to-cloud interconnect is Equinix’s fastest growing interconnect segment. It is seeing channel growth drive business with telecommunications partners such as AT&T, Orange Business and Telstra.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA ended its upwards earnings streak of the past few years. It reported a 14% decline in data center revenue among the rest of its bad news this quarter, although it reported 50% overall data center growth for its FY2019. NVIDIA GPUs are widely used by CSPs and their customers to train artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models and then to deliver inference-as-a-service based on those trained models.

Upcoming Earnings Reports

Baidu (Baidu Cloud) Thursday, February 21

Liftr Cloud Insights will cover the important cloud-related aspects of each earnings release.

Events

IBM Think: San Francisco, February 12-15, 2019

IBM Research staged a debate between its Project Debator AI system and an expert human debator. The human won this round, but the debate was close. Liftr Cloud Insights will be digging deeper into Project Debator AI over the next few weeks.

The big announcement at IBM Think was Watson running on any cloud. This is a break from IBM hosting its own SaaS products on its own IBM Cloud. And it is a great way for IBM to bet better reach with Watson. The big news at the conference was Watson on any cloud, a break from IBM hosting its own SaaS on its own IBM Cloud.

IBM will be integrating its PowerAI artificial intelligence hardware platforms into its Watson Machine Learning (ML) service. PowerAI Enterprise is now called Watson Machine Learning Accelerator. The goal is to make distributed GPU training and inference capabilities that were part of PowerAI Enterprise available to a broader range of data science clients and users. There won’t be changes this quarter to the PowerAI base framework package / offering while the company continues to make frameworks easily available for their clients to use on their own Power servers.

While IBM could not talk about the Red Hat acquisition, it is apparent that the two companies were collaborating on a number of fronts prior to the acquisition. Integrating IBM Cloud Private and Red Hat OpenShift had to have been in the works for a while.

Upcoming Events

Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona: Barcelona, Spain, February 25-28, 2019 Liftr Cloud Insights will be scanning the news from Barcelona. MWC is not specifically a cloud or data center event, but 5G and IoT rollout will have dramatic effects on edge computing infrastructure and cloud deployments.